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| Photo by Liz Lauren/Goodman Theatre |
If you asked me to start naming Shakespeare plays off the top of my head, I think I would avail myself pretty well.
There’s “Hamlet,” of course, and “Othello,” “Macbeth” and “King Lear,” “Romeo and Juliet” (telling that I would start with the tragedies — I’m a sucker for tragedy).
What else? The histories — “Richard II,” “Richard III,” “Henry IV” (parts 1 and 2), “Henry V,” “Julius Caesar.” And the comedies — my least favorite category — “As You Like It,” “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” “Taming of the Shrew,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Twelfth Night,” “The Merchant of Venice,” which nobody thinks of as a comedy, anymore, but was originally intended to be.
And then the obscure plays — “Titus Andronicus” and “Timon of Athens” and such.
I could probably scrape up a few more, but you get the idea. The point I’m crawling toward is that I’m familiar with Shakespeare, and have seen his plays by the dozens, going back to Cleveland’s Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival, up to the American Players Theatre in Wisconsin, to our own underappreciated Chicago Shakespeare Theater at Navy Pier.
“What is it about?” my wife asked, as we got ready to go, with perhaps a bit of what-am-I-getting-myself-into dread.
“A bit with a dog and love triumphant,” I guessed, quoting “Shakespeare in Love.”
Completely wrong.
Which means I had the benefit of seeing the play as a complete blank slate, expecting nothing, knowing nothing, and in my ideal world you’d set this column down right now and go see it, solely on my recommendation, then finish reading this, the way I at times rush to Hedy Weiss to explain what I’ve seen.
Not exactly a spoiler alert — I’m not the spoiler sort. But even knowing a shock is coming lessens the shock; you expect it.
And with this new production, there will be many moments when you think, “So, is THIS the shock that so rattled Steinberg’s windows?” No, it’s not. Patience. It’s coming.
The shock of what happens onstage was magnified, for me, by the shock that I was shocked at all. I don’t do shock. Shock, like being offended, is for amateurs and the old.
Besides, we have learned to expect shock in plays directed by Robert Falls. Some consider that a flaw, but I find it invigorating. He peels the velvet glove off the iron fist of sex and horror that pulses through Shakespeare and then jams it, unpadded, into your face.
Thus Ophelia, hiking up her skirts and rubbing herself in his “Hamlet.” Thus Gloucester’s eyes not only plucked out — as the Bard intended — but ending up sizzling on a restaurant line grill in “King Lear,” the whole thing set in a dissolving Eastern Europe dictatorship, the opening scene spoken by characters standing at urinals, doing their business, their backs to the audience.
That was tights and ruffs and declaiming “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on a bare stage with one hand folded atop another compared to the opening minutes of Falls’ “Measure for Measure,” a Boschian, neon-lit hellscape, half “Taxi Driver,” half Ed Paschke’s early work come to life, a loud, dirty, overwhelming set piece (“Did you see that guy masturbating?” my wife asked, on the drive home. “No,” I said, “I was focusing on the stripper.”)
Falls always shocks other people — the groundlings, the timid, the life-averse, those whose idea of tragedy is Bambi’s mother dying. Me, I collect Bob Falls shocks the way a lepidopterist collects butterflies — with zeal and appreciation: This is the stuff that upsets others but I find magnificent; a shock, yes, but in a good way, your shirt ripped open, the paddles applied and the tired old heart given a revivifying jolt, part of Falls’ lifelong rescue of Shakespeare from the rolled R crowd, returning it the alive thing it was meant to be.
But this shock is truly shocking — a lady at the after-play conversation Thursday described it as “grotesque” and I didn’t argue with her. I’m not saying Falls was wrong. He’s right. It took me a while to see it. Not until the next morning, really, when I realized that, as the shock unfolded, my mind formed an alternate narrative — where I thought he was going — that was trite, ordinary and banal.
—Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 17, 2013
My favorite line about Shakespeare comes from a 1952 movie titled Dreamboat, starring Clifton Webb, as an English professor, who secretly had been a movie star decades before & then that secret is revealed.
ReplyDeleteThis quote isn't exact, as it's from memory, but it was like this: "No one man could've written that much garbage in a single lifetime!"
I grew up a little with Mr. Falls. He and I lived for a couple years in a newer subdivision in the Western burbs, one street apart. I remember him as the tall gawky theatre kid, kinda goofy and always laughing. We attended the UIUC simultaneously, and though we never met down there, I was always interested in his work and kept track of his career ascendancy. As a "Chicagoan" (as much as one who grew up in the west burbs can use that appellation), I'm extraordinarily proud that we have a world-reknown theatre director who sprang from the pedestrian suburban existence. Bravo, Robert and godspeed you on your journey.
ReplyDeleteActually, he sprang from a tiny west central Illinois town on the prairie. As someone from another tiny town nearby, I've always been proud of Mr. Falls.
DeleteFalls does Shakespeare the way the bard intended. And the way one could never teach it in high school.
ReplyDeleteNobody's going to ask what the shock was? Well, I will. Say, Neil, at the safe remove of over ten years, how about letting us in on what would have been a spoiler in 2013? ; )
ReplyDeleteOh, good question. At the end of Falls's version, Isabella is stabbed to death.
DeleteBefore the Plague shut them down for a few years, my wife and I saw "Measure for Measure at the Oberlin Summer Theater Festival, in the spiffy new venue that the college had just dedicated and opened. The audience sat in balconies on three sides.Everything was squeaky clean.
ReplyDeleteAnd the play, though not exactly squeaky clean, wasn't done the way Falls did it in Chicago...as Times Square in the 70s.The Oberlin production was done by the book...sleazy but comedic. Sanitized, with nothing that shocked the sparse crowd. Not all that memorable, either. I had to remind myself, after reading your comments, Mr S, that I had indeed seen this play.
No near-riot for us, more of an enjoyable summertime snoozer. Now I regret not having seen the version you saw. I would have enjoyed seeing a loud and dirty hellscape far more, and maybe even remembered it.
Petetrinos! We do their upholstering!
ReplyDeleteI popped in there Monday before the play to see if they still have my picture up in my old booth. They do.
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